Welcome to the third edition of Pixel Progression!

Today is Dank Memer's 7th birthday, and WOW that's crazy to think about! I'll get to some interesting stuff first, and leave the sappy words for the end <3

In today's update, we released fight taxes after a lot of advanced warnings. To nobody's surprise, fighters are upset! And you know, we get it taxes suck.

Reality is, taxes have existed far longer than they haven't in the fighting system. They used to, for fighting, be anywhere from 1% to 13% tax depending on a few various factors. 2.5% is way more than fair enough as a middle ground. If this tax hit WITH the new system, everyone would be praising it as a buff, not a terrible thing, but it's easy to forget context. It's unfortunately one of those things where we publicly said we didn't include tax to celebrate the release of fighting 2.0, and now people are mad it's gone, which means we might have just been better off not doing the period of no tax at all.

Taxes DO actually have a point, even if you don't agree with them! In a game where nearly any action you do generates money out of nowhere, there has to be a way to slowly siphon things back out to prevent inflation. It's existed for years, and in trading pre-market it used to even go up to 20%! So they not only balance the economy, but also they help prevent scams. If you aren't aware how prevalent scams have been lately while people use fight to trade, I suggest you ask around!

No matter the feedback, taxes are here to say because it's a pillar of how a f2p economy bot with a global economy has to work. Luckily, we made the usage of taxes and paying them as seamless as possible. Anyone remember the days of "send first" to make a certain person pay the taxes? We do.

As we mentioned last week, we started a public bug tracker. That is now officially open for people to look at!

CHECK IT OUT HERE

This is a list MADE by support server moderators and MANAGED by developers. If a bug isn't on this list, it's either NOT a bug or we aren't aware of it!

Huge thanks to Dr. Asylum, Angel, and Zomb for helping out. Shoutout to all the DMS mods in fact, who help field these reports day in and day out. (Repeating from last week!)

You can see two tabs, one for ongoing bug reports and one for completed or invalid bug reports. Enjoy, we love the transparency!

Today we started part one of an overhaul to leveling and level rewards. It was the easy part, we simply changed level rewards. Check out the changelog for more info, but you can start to see where we're going with it. We'll start adding more and more things you can ONLY obtain (items/skins/pet[s]/etc) to the level track, which gives people a reason to level past just PROFIT so we can balance the profit part and foster a more healthy economy.

We'll be adding more and more over time, so even if you're not making B-B-BILLIONS per 2xp day, you're getting exclusive items and more that everyone else wants from you!

Which leads us to the next part of this blog.

We have multiple things upcoming! For starters, the next update is a lot of new rewards/content for omega users!

Past that, we're planning some goodies for valentine's day, including a new pet and a new fish guidebook skin that people will be excited for, as we put our whole cupid-ussy into the art!

Finally, starting shortly after this blog post is a competition in DMC for fish tank design. Winners bring home the BACON with some big prizes such as blobs, steam gift cards, and even naming a fish after the winner! Check out DMC announcements and we'll be posting about this soon!

Something I'd like to do each time we post one of these, is take a moment to call out cool things happening in the community.

Roses are red...

u/Ill-Brother4899 made a fun poem to celebrate Dank's 7th Birthday!

LINK: https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemer/comments/1990r9u/dank_memer_bday_party/

New Community Guide

User .crazygerman made a guide for fisherfolk to get all they need done with skill challenges!

LINK: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mxcZIbHdmGIYYkYCvtuDMM0fBTj7kcS6_MejGWWLYFw/edit?usp=sharing

Robber W

User s.t.a.r.c got their badge, and real friends help celebrate these W's (Posted in DMC)

7 years of doing this is insane. The community support through it all is even more insane. You guys playing this bot has changed lots of lives, both ours on the dev team and fellow players. We know people who have gotten married after meeting in dank servers. We know people who who got tattoos of dank items. We know LOTS of people who have made lifelong friends from this community, us included.

7 years is something most game developers could only dream of, and we've not only made it this far but we're still going STRONG thanks to your constant feedback and love for our work. You amaze us, hopefully we've had moments of amazing you and will continue to do so, even if we are a silly little pixel art frog game you play in your free time.

Even players who have quit YEARS ago, you are no less important than current users and the time you spent with us is so incredibly valuable. Players who haven't started yet and will read this in the future, we welcome you with open arms and can't wait to meet you! Current players... go buy birthday cake today before you miss it until next year!

Thank you. 7 years, here's to 7 more.

• Melmsie and Team